The Chinese word 篮子 (lánzi), meaning "basket", is a compound noun formed through a common morphological pattern in Mandarin. It consists of the meaningful root 篮 (lán), which historically referred to a bamboo container and carries the core semantic idea of "basket", combined with the suffix 子 (zi), a nominalizer that frequently attaches to single-character nouns to form a disyllabic, concrete object word. This "root + 子" structure softens the pronunciation, marks the word as a tangible item, and is a standard method for creating everyday vocabulary, where the suffix adds no independent meaning but completes the lexical form.